The distinguishing marks of a wicked beatnik, "pidarast and apstractionist," were well known to the Boss from descriptions provided by his officials. The wicked beatnik always wore a sweater and glasses, had a little beard, loved noisy "jast music," and laughed at Stalinists. . . . Thus the wicked beatnik will get to our culture, too, and will undermine the very foundations of our culture with his venomous sarcasm. . . . Here he is, the dangerous subversive, the perfidious word spinner who had unlocked the hearts of Soviet youth with the skeleton key of decadence, the leader of the beatnik horde, who had caused clouds to gather over the Socialist Motherland! They must be given a kick in the teeth before it was too late, they must be rooted out; there was already a whiff of smoke in the air that had an uncomfortably Hungarian smell to it.
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The official Soviet view of the American beatniks was very amusing. They were sort of OK, on the one hand, as shakers of the foundations of bourgeois society, and as promoters of our cause. On the other hand, they expressed merely a petit bourgeois protest, that is, they didn't promote our cause enough, they even distracted youngsters from the social struggle. In any event, at least some grains of their work began to appear in the Soviet press at the time of the "first thaw" in 1962--first, excerpts from Ginsberg's famous poem "Howl," with a preface about five times the length of the excerpts themselves, then excerpts from Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road.